Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 31

In addition to sexual abuse, BSET is used as an explanation for intimate partner abuse (IPA) (domestic violence) (Janssen et al., 2005). One evolutionary psychologist insinuates that all women are more attracted to more domineering men (Barber, 1995, p. 418). A small study solely of men verbally and physically abusive to their wives attributed their IPA to their elevated testosterone levels (Soler, Vinayak, & Quadagno, 2000), while a larger study found no relationship between men and boys’ aggression and their testosterone levels (Huesmann, Lefkowitz, Eron, & Walder, 1984). Yet other BSET proponents hypothesized that “men’s partner-directed violence is produced by psychological mechanisms evolved to solve the adaptive problem of paternity uncertainty” (Kaighobadi & Shackelford, 2009, p. 282). Other BSET studies focus on “competitively disadvantaged males” (CDMs), hypothesizing that men who rate as low quality for mates because of their low socioeconomic status and physical unattractiveness are more likely to use coerciveness and violence to gain sex (because it may be their only access to it) and to use violent sex against their wives and children in order to terrorize their wives (dominating their wives through abusing their children) into not leaving them (e.g., Figueredo et al., 2001; Figueredo & McCloskey, 1993). Once again, this approach is inherently offensive on numerous levels (e.g., class and societal ideas of attractiveness). Ironically, Figueredo and his colleagues’ test of this found the opposite of what was hypothesized: CDMs were more likely to abuse competitively disadvantaged females (CDFs) than the “higher mate quality [women] partners” they would seemingly need to abuse to “keep” (Figueredo et al., 2001, p. 315).

A survey study of women claimed to confirm BSET, reporting that women’s fear of crime levels predict their long-term mates, specifically that women with higher fear of crime levels prefer “aggressively dominant and physically formidable” mates (Snyder et al., 2011). This study did not address the culturally gendering phenomena confirmed by other research, by which women and girls are socialized to be afraid of crime and rape (Rader & Haynes, 2011; van Eijk, 2017), so much so that protecting themselves from men raping them is as a realistic, additional, gendered, and financial burden girls and women bear (Bitton & Shavit, 2015). And then there is the stark irony of society encouraging women to seek protection from men for men’s gender-based abuses of them.